Press Release
Published on April 11, 2025
Press contact: press@humanrightsfirst.org
WASHINGTON, D.C.— Human Rights First strongly condemns the White House’s invitation and upcoming meeting with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, whose authoritarian tactics and human rights violations stand in direct opposition to democratic values and the rule of law.
“Bukele’s cooperation with President Trump’s agenda, including disappearing people overseas—without due process, violating the principle of non-refoulement, and into prisons notorious for abuse—is unprecedented, rights-violating, and extreme,” said Robyn Barnard, senior director for refugee advocacy. “Disappearing people across borders into cages without evidence or accountability is the stuff of dictatorships, not democracies. Every person, regardless of their criminal history or immigration status, must have the chance for fair process and the United States must not pay to render people to torture in violation of the law. We call on Presidents Trump and Bukele to immediately return to the United States each person disappeared to the CECOT and halt this rights violating scheme.”
President Bukele’s visit comes amid growing concern over the use of El Salvador’s notorious CECOT ‘mega prison,’ which has received renewed attention after the U.S. government sent over 238 individuals there after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act—a rarely used 1798 wartime authority. The administration has labeled these individuals as members of the Tren de Aragua gang without providing notice, evidence, or a chance to contest the allegations.
Human rights groups have extensively documented that those in the El Salvador prison system, including CECOT, face torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, including physical violence and unsafe conditions linked to deaths in custody, extreme restrictions on food, water, medicine, and toilet access, denial of fresh air, and widespread abuse.
These patterns of abuse have worsened since President Bukele’s government instituted a state of exception in March 2022 that suspended constitutional rights, and arbitrarily detained more than 85,000 people, including children, many with little or no evidence of gang involvement. Many of those detained have been forcibly disappeared and denied contact with their families or attorneys.
“Under President Bukele, human rights, democratic norms, and the rule of law have all but disappeared in El Salvador,” said Amanda Strayer, Senior Counsel for Accountability at Human Rights First. “The United States should be holding Bukele’s government accountable for these serious violations, but instead the Trump administration is cozying up to and copying Bukele’s authoritarian playbook – rounding up people with no evidence, denying them any due process, and disappearing them in abusive Salvadoran prisons indefinitely.”
In 2023, Human Rights First formally recommended that the U.S. Departments of the Treasury and State impose Global Magnitsky sanctions on four Salvadoran officials for their role in gross human rights violations, including mass arbitrary arrests and detentions, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances, and torture and ill-treatment related to the state of exception.
